Dr. Tony Holohan:

I am going to come back on Senator Buttimer's question. Any experience I ever had when he was Chair of the Oireachtas health committee is that his recollection is exactly the same as mine. It was always an experience I enjoyed and relished. I hope that we gave good evidence and supported the work of the committee during that time. That is exactly as I remember it.

In broad terms, our ambition is to find ourselves in a situation where two things happen: one, we get the level of disease in this country down to a level that we think we can safely resume activity. So far, we have been making good progress as a country in relation to that through the work that people have been doing. If anything, we are seeing an improved situation epidemiologically. We are taking confidence from that, but perhaps not getting ahead of ourselves too much given that there is still potential for things to go wrong. That is not dissuading us at the moment from staying the course that we are on, which is really encouraging.

We are getting people vaccinated at a very high rate in terms of the acceptance of the vaccination and the numbers. The HSE is getting through a very impressive programme of vaccination that is giving people increasing protection. That is the strategy. It is working. We want to be in a situation whereby we can see the economy and society in all of its manifestations returning when it is appropriate and safe to do so without a dependence on any form of testing.

This is what the estimates of the green light that we spoke about is all about: that we will not find ourselves in a situation whereby something is unsafe from our point of view but is now rendered safe simply through the use of antigen tests. We have not seen any evidence that would give us assurance that we think something that was inherently unsafe can now be rendered safe because people are using antigen testing. The premise, not of what Senator Buttimer said, but a lot of what is being said in general terms by people, is that we would use it in these green light situations and that we would be able to resume a named activity, whatever it might be, if only we were using antigen testing. That is an implied use in a green light way for asymptomatic populations. There is no published evidence at all in that regard. In fact, very few studies have looked at this question in any setting and those that have not produced encouraging results.